An Exaltation of Soups (18 page)
Read An Exaltation of Soups Online
Authors: Patricia Solley
W
ONDERFULLY PURE, A
“vat” of this stuff lasts about a week, depending on how much you eat each day. Eat as much of the soup as you like, as often as you like. Here’s what else you can eat along with the soup, and when:
D
AY 1
: All fruits except bananas.
D
AY 2
: All vegetables, raw or cooked. This includes baked potatoes with a
little
butter.
D
AY 3
: Fruits and vegetables, but no potatoes or bananas.
D
AY 4
: Bananas and skim milk—eat as many as 8 bananas and drink as many as 8 glasses of skim milk. You may substitute nonfat yogurt for the milk and flavor it with vanilla or mashed bananas.
D
AY 5
: Beef, skinless chicken, and/or fish—as much as 20 ounces total. You can also eat 6 tomatoes. And you must drink 8 glasses of water. Don’t forget at least 1 bowl of soup.
D
AY 6
: Beef, skinless chicken, or fish and vegetables. Drink 8 glasses of water and eat at least 1 bowl of soup.
D
AY 7
: Brown rice, vegetables, and unsweetened fruit juice.
1 head green cabbage, finely shredded or chopped
2 large onions, chopped
16 to 28 ounces canned tomatoes, chopped, with juices
2 green bell peppers, seeded and chopped
4 celery stalks with leaves, chopped
6 carrots, peeled and sliced
½ pound green beans, stem ends snapped, sliced on the diagonal
Black pepper to taste
Chopped fresh herbs, such as parsley, sage, dill, cilantro, or thyme
G
ARNISH
Balsamic vinegar or lemon or lime juice
Minced fresh herbs
Chopped green onions
O
P
REPARE
Prep the ingredients as directed in the recipe list.
O
C
OOK
Put all the vegetables in a big soup pot and cover with water. Bring to a boil over high heat, then reduce the heat to medium and boil gently for 10 minutes. Cover, reduce the heat to low, and simmer until all the vegetables are soft. Stir in the black pepper and chopped herbs.
O
S
ERVE
This soup can be served hot or cold. It can be pureed or partially pureed to vary textures. It can be seasoned differently for variety, with balsamic vinegar, lemon or lime juice, different fresh herbs, or chopped green onions.
Serves 1 for 2 evening meals
T
HIS STORY WAS
sent to me by Ronnie Reed of Worthington, Ohio, and the story is even (or perhaps much) better than the recipe he enclosed—an inspiration to lovers everywhere. If you’re trying to survive a difficult time, aren’t used to cooking, wouldn’t mind losing a little weight, are yearning to be with the one you love—any or all of these things—I think you’ll be interested in what Ronnie has to say about soup and love.
I’m thirty-one years of age and work for an international business machine company. My wife and I have been married for twelve years. I have grown to love and appreciate soups in general lately. During my separation from my wife, I ate soup for lunch and dinner for, well, let’s just say
a long time!
I went from 220 down to 190 in a matter of months. I still eat soup at least twice a week. In a nutshell, it’s good for you and good for the soul.
Soup rules!
Here’s my story and recipe.
This soup was invented during a time when my wife and I were separated for a few months. I wanted to lose weight and cut back on costs but not die from starvation, so I had to learn how to cook. Man cannot live off beer and peanut-butter crackers alone. To me, if it’s worth looking at, it’s worth eating. So in an attempt to be as creative as I could without burning down the kitchen, I made “The Starving Artist Soup.” It’s easy, it’s quick, and it looks good, too. What you will need are …
2 (10-ounce) cans Campbell’s Beef Vegetable Soup
1 pound hamburger meat (ground sirloin)
Brown the hamburger meat in a pot and drain the grease (the second step is optional, depending on how hungry you are). Add the 2 cans of soup to the hamburger, then add 2 cans of water. Let it cook for 2 minutes on high heat, then bring it down to a simmer.
It makes about four bowls, so you can eat two that night and have leftovers the next night for dinner. It does taste better the second day; I’m not sure why. I lived on this stuff for four months. I lost twenty pounds, paid my expenses, and survived. My wife, after discovering that I hadn’t died without her, came back. That’s my story and recipe. Thanks for reading it.
T
O
S
TIMULATE AN
A
PPETITE
O
NCE UPON A TIME
, that magnificent “Monarch of the Kitchen,” Antonin Carême—chef to Talleyrand, Tsar Alexander I, George IV, and Baron de Rothschild—stipulated that soup “must be the agent provocateur of a good dinner.” Nineteenth-century French gastronome and lawyer Alexandre-Balthazar-Laurent Grimod de la Reynière agreed, opining that “soup is to dinner what the portico or the peristyle is to an edifice. That is to say, not only is it the first part, but it should be conceived in such a way as to give an exact idea of the feast, very nearly as the overture to an opera should announce the quality of the whole work.”
In other words, when you’re in the business of
stimulating
appetites, you are not going to be tossing chunks of pure vegetable into fat-free water or broth and calling it a day. You are, rather, orchestrating exquisite creations out of precious ingredients that are designed to excite the eye, the nose, and the palate.
In today’s largely overweight society, you don’t hear a lot of call for this kind of appetite teasing. And yet that call is there: for those who suffer from anorexia or bulimia; those who have lost weight after medical procedures like chemotherapy; elderly people suffering appetite loss, who need to be coaxed back to strength—not to mention athletes who are trying to make weight. In all these cases, what could be better than an elegant and very thin potation that delights with delicate beauty and taste, that sharpens the appetite with a little sharpness of its own, or that teases the tongue with layers of flavor in a concentrated cream?
Each of the following recipes is set for four servings—say, for that intimate dinner party you’ve been thinking about hosting. But each can easily be doubled for an even bigger splash, or halved for
dîner à deux.
T
HE
K
INDEST
C
OURSE
Soup is cuisine’s kindest course. It breathes reassurance; it steams consolation; after a weary day it promotes sociability … there is nothing like a bowl of hot soup, its wisp of aromatic steam making the nostrils quiver with anticipation.
—C
HEF
L
OUIS
P. D
E
G
OUY
,
The Soup Book, 1949
C
RAB
T
ALES
John Russell describes crab in his 1460 Boke of Nurture as “a slutt to kerve and a wrawd wight” (a perverse creature).
Norman Douglas describes its hold over Italians when he noted “Beelzebub himself could never keep a Capri fisherman out of a sea-cave if there was half a franc’s worth of crabs inside it.”
Poet T. S. Eliot plays it against type when he has his timid J. Alfred Prufrock declare, “I should have been/a pair of ragged claws/Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.”
In fact, the crab is a crustacean that, as a general rule, will eat anything it runs across, and likes nothing better than to fight and procreate. So much for Eliot’s image of a repressed creature.
Serves 4
